Amanda Roman, an English as a second language teacher in Elmsford, used to have to translate handwritten Spanish notes from students' parents for her colleagues.

That changed recently when parents and teachers at Dixson Primary School, for grades pre-K-1, began using a new text message translating platform.

“A lot of (parents) were very excited that there was this option, especially with the translation and that they could do it right from their phone,” Roman said. “If they don’t have a computer, they’re not emailing the teachers as much, so doing it on the phone was exciting for a lot of them.”

TalkingPoints is the name of the California-based nonprofit that developed the service specifically designed to link teachers with students’ parents who are not native English speakers.

It works by having a teacher log into their account from a browser, typing a message — like a homework reminder or announcement — and sending it to individual parents or a group using their cell phone numbers. Parents — who must sign up to get the messages — receive them on their phone as if it were a normal text, and can respond to the teacher as a text.

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Adrienne Capocci, a kindergarten teacher at the Dixson Primary School in Elmsford, shows off a text message alert from TalkingPoints.(Photo11: Mark Vergari/The Journal News)

Adrienne Capocci, a kindergarten teacher at Dixson where 56 percent of students are Hispanic and 15 percent are of Asian descent, said communicating with parents who speak a different language has been a challenge in the past.

“I teach a class that’s primary English language learners," she said. "I have found over the past couple of years that I’ve been teaching this particular class, that the parents don’t seem as involved."

In the three days they've been using the program, Capocci said she’s already noticed a difference.

“I have one parent who doesn’t speak English, but he responded to me right away so I know he at least got it and read it, and he’s not a parent that I’m in contact with regularly,” she said.

Making those connections is exactly what inspired Heejae Lim, founder and executive director of TalkingPoints, to pursue the idea for the product.

At age 8, Lim and her parents moved from South Korea to an English suburb where there was a large Korean immigrant population. While Lim’s family spoke English, that wasn’t the case for many of her peers and their parents who also lived in the area.

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From left, Adrienne Capocci, a kindergarten teacher, Amanda Roman, an English as a new language teacher, Principal Jeffrey Olender and Joseph Ricca, the Elmsford Schools Superintendent are pictured at the Dixson Primary School in Elmsford.(Photo11: Mark Vergari/The Journal News)

“The way my mom engaged with my teacher was very different than what my friends’ parents could do,” Lim said. “I saw the impact on parent engagement being a big driver of my learning, but also a lot of parents, because of various barriers, couldn’t be as heavily involved as they would like to.”

Dixson is one of more than 500 schools across the country, and the only one on the East Coast, that has adopted TalkingPoints as part of a district partnership since the program's launch in 2015.

Joseph Ricca, Elmsford’s superintendent, said within hours of sending the invitation for parents to sign up for TalkingPoints, more than 60 percent had opted into using the service.

Ricca said connecting with non-English speaking parents has been an issue on his radar and after reading about TalkingPoints online, he reached out to Lim and her team to see if they could participate.

“We knew this was a major challenge for us for all schools: How do you make sure you’re able to communicate with every segment of your population,” Ricca said. With this technology, he said, “We’re addressing that challenge, but then at the same time how do we do it so that it’s going to be efficient and easy to use — I mean text messaging, everybody texts.”

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Amanda Roman, an English as a new language teacher at the Dixson Primary School in Elmsford, works with students.(Photo11: Mark Vergari/The Journal News)

Indira Tascon, a parent of a kindergartener at Dixson, said even though she is a fluent English speaker, being able to text her child’s teacher, as opposed to email, has been helpful.

“I love it because I like the immediate response,” Tascon said. “To be able to respond right back and ask the questions that I needed to ask was great because then I don’t have to sit down and worry about email.”

When it comes to student privacy and data collection, Ricca said this was one of the first questions he had for Lim.

“The children’s information, the messages is all completely private,” he said. “They have access to, if they need to get into your dashboard, but they do not own any of the information.”

In addition, administrators like Dixson Principal Jeffrey Olender can see every exchange between teacher and parent — both in all English, which is the language his platform is set up with, and in the original language the text was composed in.

“I actually was looking at the conversations between one of my teachers and a parent that speaks Tagalog,” a language used in the Philippines, Olender said. “To see that back-and-forth was really unique, something that we really haven’t seen before.”

Other languages that have been used so far by participating Elmsford parents include Spanish, Russian, Arabic and French-creole.

“Spanish is our most prevalent, but where I think it really bridges a gap is in the additional languages,” Olender said.